


Civil War

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: Closet Sex, Closets, Fluff, Friendship, Kisses, M/M, Matchmaking, Scheming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 23:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6829537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> “I think I will mention to M my recommendation of having you out in the field again.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“He won’t let me,” Eve sighs. “Something about shooting 007.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“That would be one way to solve the problem I suppose,” Tanner replies blithely. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Civil War

**Author's Note:**

> Written at the request of a lovely friend on Twitter :3

“Morning, Josie.”

“Is it?”

“Morning,” Eve asks, brow arched. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Josephine’s cheeks color brightly and she purses her lips together. Taking the sugar from Moneypenny to temper her tea, she stirs in two too many spoonfuls. “Sorry, I thought you said good morning.”

“Is it?”

“No,” Josie says, spoon clinking against the edge of her cup as she leans back against the counter, and watches Eve through the steam. She takes a sip and daubs her tongue against the milky drop at the center of her lips, scanning their surroundings as Eve starts a second cup for M. “He’s being horrid.”

“Q?”

Josephine hushes her, wary. “He’s just pushed all our deadlines up a week. No reason given at all, just a fresh pile of specs dropped on our desks and his little dictator footsteps clicking by.”

“Did you ask him why? That doesn’t sound quite like our quartermaster,” Eve suggests. Josie’s snort says as much as the dark circles beneath her eyes.

“‘It isn’t your job to ask why, Ms. Sheppard’,” she mimics, voice low but brought posh and clipped in a fair imitation. “‘It’s your job to do, and I’d suggest you get a move on.’”

Eve takes a deliberate sip of her tea and keeps her brows raised in an elegant image of gentle surprise. The engineer narrows her eyes and waits for an explanation that comes in a single clipped word.

“Bond.”

“Again?”

“When is it ever not? All he does is pull Q’s strings and tighten him further than his brilliant mind can go,” Eve shrugs. She checks the tea and sets the spoon aside, picking up both her mug and M’s cup and saucer.

“At least he doesn’t mess with deadlines,” Josie sighs, leaning her hip against the counter. “What did he do?”

“I think it’s a case of what he wants Q to do, and what Q, rightfully, doesn’t want to do for him.”

“Suits,” Tanner replies, not even stopping by the kitchen as he passes with a pile of papers and his own mug balanced atop. “It is always suits.”

They watch him as he continues on, and as Eve starts to follow him back towards her desk, Josephine keeps stride.

“It’s his job to do what an agent needs,” she says. “That’s what a quartermaster does.”

"He isn't a servant," answers Eve. "He's an entire department to run, you and all the others - on surveillance, overwatch, and engineering - to oversee. Poor thing’s already a modern miracle for still standing at all. It's unfair to demand he bend more just because 007's being a prat."

Josephine stops, mid-stride, and watches Eve as she goes. "You're siding with Q!"

"I've known 007 long enough to know when he's wrong, Ms. Sheppard."

"Don't you start that, too," Josephine mutters against her cup. "Josie's fine."

Eve catches up with Tanner, bustling forward through the halls, arms stuffed with paperwork. She matches his quick steps, teacup and mug extended ably, and she leans close.

"Suits?"

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t start this,” Tanner tells her, adjusting his mug so he can keep reading a paragraph that it was partially covering. “You will only find fault in what he wants.”

“You’re not exactly a yes man to him, why does it matter?”

“Because I am Switzerland,” Tanner tells her, smiling briefly. “I refuse to take sides. If you want to know what happened, ask the quartermaster. Ask 007. Ask M.”

“M knows?”

“What doesn’t M know?”

Eve hums, unable to argue. She lets Tanner go about his way, easing her steps as she makes her way towards M’s office. Her own mug is set to her desk before she knocks and waits for the call to enter.

“Mallory.”

“Moneypenny.” He rubs his eyes and sits back in his chair, grunting brief appreciation when his cup is set down for him. “Bloody godsend. Thank you.”

Eve stands back and crosses her arms in what she hopes comes across as a casual indifference. She does wait, however, for M to take a sip of his tea, savor it, take another and sit back.

“There seems to be tension between the quartermaster and an agent,” she suggests carefully. “Difficulty in communication or something. Should I look into it?”

"I can't imagine a poorer use of your time and energy, but do as you like."

Eve raises a brow at the curt tone, and lowers it only when Mallory lifts his fingers in what passes as apology. "What's he done this time?"

"Which one?" He asks, as tired as he is exasperated. "They're as bad as children. I'm one more neatly written complaint - from either - from sending them both to opposite corners of MI6."

Moneypenny fights down a smile that plucks at the corners of her lips. "They've been writing complaints?"

"Slipping them beneath my door marked 'for M's eyes only'."

"May I see them?" It's a credit to her training, really, that Eve keeps her expression neutral.

"I just set the whole lot in the bin. Take them and shred them, would you? Light them on fire," he adds.

 

“I could do both,” Eve suggests, amused, bending to take up the dustbin in question. “Along with the bin.”

“No, I want that back,” Mallory tells her, sighing as he sits forward to hunch over his tea again. “They’ll inevitably send more, and then where will I put them?”

“You make an excellent point, sir,” Eve tells him, turning to take the bin out, closing the door quietly behind herself. Immediately settling to her desk she rummages through to find the notes, delighting in how many there are. Most are from Q, but some, notably, are from 007, his writing far less flowery and his accusations far more to the point.

The notes range from complaining of smartass remarks, to inappropriate behavior in the Q Branch lab - apparently Bond decided to eat lunch in there and Q found that incredibly offensive, though he does that often himself - to the final ones, dated this very morning.

_“I’m not fixing his bloody suit, M, I am not a sartorialist. I am an engineer. If 007 has let himself go enough that new measurements were necessary from his previous job, it is hardly my fault. Should he find a tailor willing to work with bulletproof material on short notice he is more than welcome to take the clothing away to be amended, but I have far too much to do to worry about his bloody appearance.”_

Eve bites her lip to keep her laughter at bay. Bond’s note is much shorter.

_”Please tell your prick of a quartermaster that the fit of the suit is as much for vanity as it is for safety. Gaping as it is against my shoulders and down through my waist, I could collect an entire arsenal of bullets within it before it protects anything at all.”_

“They are like bloody school children,” she remarks softly, unfolding another note, this one marked just _M - Urgent_.

_“If he doesn’t want it, fine. If he won’t use it, fine. It won’t be the first time - nor the last - that good work has gone to waste on him. But please inform your agent that malingering around my office door, glowering, is a detriment to both my productivity and the morale of my Branch. Your intercession is greatly appreciated.”_

Several more notes from Q to similar effect - _loitering_ , _glaring_ , _faffing about as if he’s got nothing better to do in all the world, like saving it, for instance_ \- are set aside. Eve finds another from Bond at the bottom of the stack.

_“Requesting permission to go off-course with my nutritional regimen so as to satisfy the quartermaster. Please respond post-haste before I piss off to the pub anyway to get fat on fish and chips and lagers.”_

That would explain where Bond had gone earlier, then.

Eve takes the notes and keeps them, certain that M will hardly care where they end up as long as it isn’t under his door. She sets the dustbin aside to take back in once he’s finished his tea. She checks the time and takes up the receiver to dial an internal number.

“I won’t tell you about it,” Tanner replies lazily, a shuffle suggesting he’s cradling the phone against his shoulder as he works on something else in the background.

“You needn’t, I’ve read them.”

“Terrible, aren’t they?”

“The children? Utterly spoiled, the both of them. We need to do something.”

“We?”

“Come on Tanner, you won’t sit this out, you’re far too curious.”

“I’m Switzerland,” he reminds her blandly.

Moneypenny hums, leaning back in her chair. “A point of perfect neutrality,” she agrees, twining the phone’s cord around her fingers. “A safe haven for refugees caught between two warring parties.”

“As if you’ve not already taken up with one side over the other. Or against one side, rather than in support of the other.”

“I’m willing to do what it takes to unruffle feathers,” she says, smile widening.

“You know, it’s a damn shame they don’t have you out there again yet. Better use of your cleverness than muddling in office politics,” responds Tanner, and Eve is able to temper her smile so as not to seem suspicious when M passes by, squinting at her sidelong. “What did you have in mind?”

She waits until he’s gone, flipping quickly to her schedule to ensure she’s not needed for the meeting he’s off to attend. Tanner says her name twice, as if the line’s gone dead, and just before he hangs up she speaks softly and quickly.

“Neither of them are going to apologize. Neither of them are going to back down. Bond’s off having a pint and Q’s making the Branch’s life hell right now.”

“How do you know that?”

“Josie told me.”

“Ms. Sheppard,” Tanner asks, and Moneypenny rolls her eyes a little.

“We need to apologize for them if they won’t do it themselves. Counterfeit two letters, falsifying their handwriting, and pass them off at the same time. Bond apologizing to Q for being an insufferable egotist, Q apologizing to Bond for - well, the same, really.”

“You want to apologize on their behalf,” Tanner asks, and knows his answer even as Eve takes a breath to repeat it. “I think I will mention to M my recommendation of having you out in the field again.”

“He won’t let me,” she sighs. “Something about shooting 007.”

“That would be one way to solve the problem I suppose,” Tanner replies blithely, shifting the phone against his ear again. “I’m staying out of this. I have no loyalties in either party here and I would rather not get in the middle of the blood bath. I know Q Branch won’t make _me_ another suit if it gets destroyed.”

“I’m sure Q could have quite a hand in having you and Josephine talk more.”

“Q,” Tanner emphasizes the letter for a few more syllables than it rightfully deserves, quieting his words as he goes on. “Needs to sort out his own mess of amorous tension before attempting to parse through another’s.”

“I said nothing about amorous tension,” Eve grins.

“Neither did I,” Tanner sniffs. “Excuse me, I have a meeting to attend.”

“Desk jockey,” she snorts.

“Goodbye, Moneypenny.”

“You already know what’s going to be done, you’re involved whether you like it or -”

The phone clicks off and Eve laughs, louder than she intends, drawing looks from the office across the way. She closes her fingers over her mouth and hangs up the receiver, lifting her hand in apology to the assistants watching her with arched brows. Slowly, with the delicious sensation of scheming made physical, she folds her fingers together, and begins to work out an accord.

Using the letters she has, and the time available while out from under M’s watchful eye, she begins to work together apologies from both sides. It’s a pleasant surprise to discover that her skill at forgery hasn’t faded with disuse, catching Q’s looping cursive and Bond’s stiff overbearing on his pen in equal measure. She keeps his short, and lets Q’s go on a bit longer than needed, including a pensive spot of ink from a pen held too long against a page in thought of which she’s particularly proud.

The old notes to M disappear into her drawer, and she tucks each apology into an envelope marked for their recipient. Tanner avoids her between meetings, but Sheppard she finds back in the cafeteria refilling her tea, passing along the note for Q to drop off on his desk.

“What -”

“Trust me,” Eve shrugs, setting another mug beneath the coffeemaker for herself as the tea brews in another china cup for M.

“Trust is a dirty word in this business.”

“You’re jaded for a twenty-year-old,” Eve points out, amused, and Josie snorts, shaking her head.

“He had me redo the schematics for a regenerating engine for no other reason than the blueprint wasn’t blue enough. This better be good. Whatever it is. What is it?”

Moneypenny sizes her up, squinting a little, pressing her lips between her teeth as if in appraisal. She knows that Sheppard is as good as they come, and in that, better than most. And she knows that Josie, maybe more than most, is desperate for an end to this feud.

“An apology,” she says.

Josie’s eyes widen, then narrow, and then she snorts. “Bollocks.”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you curse before.”

“Trying times and all that - an apology from Bond?” Josie laughs, tucking the envelope into her lab coat pocket. “I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t have to,” Eve smiles. “You’ve just got to drop it on his desk and go back to making your blueprints more blue.”

“You know if I don’t believe it he won’t believe it.”

“I’m banking on his Sherlockian nature,” Eve says, coffee in one hand and tea held in the other. “Once he rules out the impossible, then whatever remains -”

“- however improbable, must be true.” Josie smiles. “But you realize that he will immediately consider Bond apologizing as impossible.”

“More likely he would apologize than someone would forge it for him.” Eve grins when Josie raises a brow askance. “The notes went to M directly, through no messenger. No one, beyond anyone who has ears or eyes, knows they’re in a spat at all, let alone what it’s about.”

“Everyone has eyes and ears,” Josie reminds her. “Especially here, where we make our own espionage when we’re not assigned to field work.”

“If you keep overthinking it, you’re more complicit,” Moneypenny confides. They share sly smiles and Eve winks, an expression so very 007 that Sheppard laughs aloud. “Just leave it on his desk and your job is done. Easy.”

“I’ve never been involved in a drop before.”

“Then I’m honored to be your first,” Eve laughs, as she pushes forward off the counter to return to M with tea and coffee in hand.

Josephine watches her go, the sway in her walk and the bounce in her curls, the resolute pride that she sees in every agent that saunters through the halls of the River House. She envies it, more than a little. She marvels at the assuredness, as the lean envelope in her pocket suddenly feels like an anchor.

She doesn’t know anything, she tells herself as she makes her way back to Q Branch. She’s only been given a note to drop off to her quartermaster, without any idea as to the contents. All Josephine Sheppard has to do is leave it on his desk and take her tea back to her desk and continue work.

She can do this. She can. She’s been given a mission and by God, she’ll see it through.

Q is at his desk.

Of course he's at his desk. 

And if she loiters he will see her and ask what she wants and she has the uncanny inability to lie around him no matter how she tries. No. She can't just give it to him, she needs a reason to be there, a stack of pages to hand to him along with the envelope.

“Ms. Sheppard, can I help you?” Q sounds as exhausted as Josie looks and as angry as she's sure Bond feels. It's unbearable. 

“I’ve redone the prints,” she says, though it isn't true. “If you wanted to have a look.”

“Hand them here.”

She does. Her quartermaster doesn’t lift his gaze, a crease indented in his brow that hasn’t eased for days now. He fans through the paperwork with quick flicks and narrow squints. His fingertips trace over her notations on the schematics, lips moving in silent calculations.

He rolls them up and stands, with the same damned mechanics that he denounced that morning.

“These are fine,” he says. “I’m going to go make sure that manufacturing doesn’t botch up the entire endeavor.”

“Thank you, quartermaster,” she answers, watching as he stalks away, in his rumpled cardigan and unpressed trousers. Hand against his mouth, he rubs the unshorn scruff on his cheeks and carries her work away, and she slips the envelope quickly from her pocket to his desk before following after.

She slips her phone from her pocket, and to Moneypenny, sends a single message:

_Mission accomplished._

“Good girl,” Eve murmurs to her phone, before pocketing it and turning back to the man before her.

“Switzerland,” Tanner sighs, giving Eve a sidelong glance before narrowing his eyes. “Why don’t you give it to him?”

“With what pretext? We don’t talk regularly here unless we make the conscious effort to, and I can’t just hand him the thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because Q and I don’t talk unless we make the effort to either,” Eve reminds him, laughing. Tanner hardly seems moved. Moneypenny pushes a muffin his way and leans further over the lunchroom table. “Josie helped me get the first note out there,” she says. “Her first covert operation. She took to it like a champion.”

His brow creases, to mask the softness Eve can see in the corners of his eyes anyway at mention of Sheppard. “So why can’t she do this one then?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” says Moneypenny. “Coming up out of the dungeon to visit a double-oh? Q’s double-oh? He’d know something was up. It has to be you, and it has to be today. And then you can commiserate over coffee together about all the terrible things I’ve put you two up to,” she adds, brow raised.

Tanner squints a little harder, lips thinned. “Going to arrange that too?”

“I could,” she says with a smile. “Call me Matchmaker. New code name.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I’m a woman of my word,” she says, sliding the envelope across to him, beside his muffin. “Best of luck, Agent Tanner, and Godspeed.”

“We need to get you more work to do,” Tanner sighs, taking the muffin up first.

Delivery of the note to 007 is hardly as covert - nor is such secrecy necessary - as the delivery to Q had been. Tanner gives him paperwork from M, records to go over from Q branch, and the envelope mixed within. When Bond asks about it, Tanner shrugs, and with a slap to his shoulder, James Bond goes on his way.

His work done - against his will, he is certain to remind Moneypenny frequently - Tanner returns to his desk. He takes his time in writing Eve an email, his confirmation of the task couched in tedious descriptions of something else entirely. She will figure it out, he’s certain. Hitting send, Tanner sits back and considers the likelihood of asking 007 to borrow a decent tie should Moneypenny come through with her promise of asking Ms. Sheppard to coffee on Tanner’s behalf.

The email buzzes Eve’s phone but she doesn’t reach for it. Instead she gathers her folder to her chest and crosses her arms over it as the quartermaster stands before her bewildered and asks again: “Did he actually write this?”

“I cannot answer that question,” she says.

“Why not? Because he didn’t, did he? Or he did, and you’re covering for him because he’s too bloody ashamed to show himself and look me in the eye.”

“I can’t answer it because you’ve not told me whom or what you’re talking about,” laughs Eve, edging around her desk. “All you’ve done is demand to know if ‘he actually wrote this’.”

“Bond,” Q says, taking quick backward steps to stay in front of her, and setting himself squarely in the doorway. “Did Bond write this letter?”

“Can I see it?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then how should I know,” she exclaims. “Ask him your-”

“Moneypenny,” Bond calls down the hall.

“Yourself,” she finishes to Q, with a wry little smile and a wrinkle in her nose.

Q draws a breath to say something and then promptly says nothing as 007 saunters over and furrows his brow at Moneypenny with a quiet hum. “Am I interrupting?”

“Aren’t you always, in some way?” Q mutters, lifting his eyes and slipping them to the side when James attempts to meet them. He doesn’t deign to answer that and turns to Eve once more.

“I was actually after Ms. Sheppard,” he continues. Here, a pause, enough that it is damn near awkward before he fills in the rest. “She… Tanner, actually, handed me some of her work today and I need to discuss some of the finer points within it.”

“What is it?”

“Blueprints,” Bond tells him, smiling thinly, though his eyes narrow as he tries to hide another expression behind apparent disdain. “Drawn by Ms. Sheppard. To whom I would like to speak about them.”

Eve watches the exchange, barely breathing for excitement, but neither do more than peacock before the other and sniff like proud little boys. Finally Q shrugs haughtily and gestures over his shoulder for Bond to seek her in Q Branch.

“She ought to be at her desk,” Q says as Bond passes by, in some small, desperate attempt to keep him there a moment more. “Or at least she’d better be, we’ve got deadlines.”

“Thanks,” James answers. He pulls his lips together thin, parts them as if to speak, and then turns to continue down the hall.

Moneypenny merely marvels, now as so many times before, at the stubbornness of men who even with apologies in hand still can’t find the bollocks to talk to each other. Q turns back to Eve and he throws his hands up in frustration, as Bond turns the corner.

Swift steps bring him through the familiar halls to the dungeon, positively infested with Q’s minions all scurrying about in their lab coats and glasses and carrying armfuls of God knows what. His mood had settled, for a moment, in reading the apology penned to him. It was the first instant in days in which he’d managed to take a full breath. And then something itched. Something stuck. Something pulled his attention back to the letter and something about the word choices maybe, or the tone of it, stopped sitting right.

Q being a prick in the hall outside Moneypenny’s office hardly helped smooth the feeling over. So much for a bloody apology.

He lays it flat on Sheppard’s desk, smoothing it before her, but even that quiet movement is enough to nearly startle the engineer from her seat.

“Jesus shit,” she hisses, before turning her knuckles against her lips to tuck the curse away again. “My apologies, 007. You startled me.”

“Hardly my intention,” he apologizes, dragging over a seat without asking if he can or should, and sitting opposite her, the table between them. “I just… needed to ask your opinion on something.”

“Oh?” Josephine blinks, eyes wide, and tries to calm her heart that immediately races at the thought of what this discussion could pertain. 

“I find myself in a predicament, where I’m unsure if my prejudices and personal opinions on a certain individual block me from accepting something as fact.”

Josie blinks. James smiles briefly and licks his lips, pushing the letter closer.

“You know him best, and you know his behaviour best. I’m hardly the easiest person to work with and certainly not the only he has spats with regularly, but I can’t quite figure out why I would be the only person he would apologize to. And verbosely at that.”

Josie swallows, brows up in a semblance of gentle surprise, and slips her eyes to the page. It’s damn near filled with Q’s elegant yet somehow manically quick hand. She doesn’t try to read it, she knows the entire game will be given up if she does.

“I don’t understand,” she tries carefully, looking up at the agent again. “If you’ve the letter from him… what would you like from me?”

“Confirmation, I suppose,” he laughs, teeth pressing to his bottom lip before he sits back and draws a hand over his face. “I find myself almost desperately wanting to believe him in his apology and… the rest.”

Josie manages a smile that eases a little, once she makes it stick. She removes her antistatic gloves and folds her hands between her knees, watching James rather than the letter that she most decidedly does not want to read. “Then it sounds like you already know the answer you want.”

“But it might not be the right answer.”

“Does that matter?” Josie asks, not imperious in the least, but rather with a simple shrug. “Honestly, does being right matter when the answer you want is the one that he wants too? When it’s the one that would finally bring a bit of bloody peace back to this place?”

Bond blinks, brows up in surprise and amusement. Josie bites the inside of her lip and directs her eyes away, to the letter, up over Bond’s head, back to his eyes for only a moment before shrugging. “It’s not like we haven’t noticed.”

“Is he vocal about it?” Bond asks suddenly, smiling as he does. “Does he complain about me?”

“007 -”

“What does he say?”

“Is it really pertinent?” She asks, tone imploring him to not ask further.

“It’s interesting.”

“But not important.”

Bond sits back, hands to his lips, as though he has his answer already. He doesn’t torment Josephine further with question, and instead slips the letter back to himself to read over it once more. He smiles at certain paragraphs, at turns of phrase and deliberately structured sentences that have him hearing the quartermaster’s voice damn near reciting this to him as though he’d spoken it, not written it.

“Thank you,” Bond says after a moment, folding the letter between his fingers and ignoring the pursing of Josie’s lips when she isn’t offered the chance to read it. “If you’ll excuse me. Oh.” He pauses, adjusting his suit and doing up the button on it again as he stands. “Wonderful work by the way. Top notch. Keep it up.”

She glances down to the little circuit board beneath her, on a bed of blueprints, and looks back up to watch Bond walk away. She watches a little longer than necessary, and tells herself she’s earned that much at least, murmuring a word of thanks towards his back.

Bond hears him muttering before he even sees him. Slowing to a stop in the hallway, he listens, smile widening as Q’s softly whispered words grow louder and louder. He can’t understand them, at this distance, at this volume, but it hardly matters. Q’s singular footsteps and the ruddy hot clamor of his heart tells him everything he needs right now.

Q has scarcely turned the corner when he’s snatched nearly from his feet, yelping alarm. Bond cradles him back against his chest, hand over his mouth, and with his free hand jerks open the janitorial closet of which they’ve made something of a love nest. He twists Q inside and ignores the papers that scatter around them, turning so his back is against the door to shut it quickly.

Bond reaches up to switch on the light, and meets Q’s eyes with a smile.

“Quartermaster.”

“007,” Q whispers.

He is lovely, flushed in his anger and confusion, brows drawn and lips parted. He is lovely, exhausted and rumpled as he is and Bond doesn’t want to let him go for the world. Not that the closet would allow them much space to part, anyway.

“Darling, you’re a shit, you know that?” James tells him softly, amused immediately by the narrowing of light eyes behind his glasses.

“ _I’m_ a shit?”

“Sending me a bloody letter instead of coming to find me instead. Very like you, being so damn covert.”

Q blinks, eyes widening in the dim light. Bond leans in with a hand against his cheek, and Q twists back, bumping his back into the shelving.

“I didn’t write you a letter,” he says, brow creased. “You left one for me, on my desk.”

For a moment, Bond is motionless. When his stillness breaks, it’s with the touch of his tongue against his lips. “Did I,” he says.

“Too many pints at the pub? All that fish and chips muddled your memory,” Q says, eyes narrowed. “You did. I have it, somewhere - somewhere on the floor now, but I have it. Are you telling me it was meaningless?”

Bond’s eyes narrow further and he slowly shakes his head, tongue a little more clear against the corner of his mouth. “No.” The vowel is elongated, low, purred by the end and Q makes a frustrated sound that at once eases his expression and tenses his body. “I certainly am not saying that.”

Q shakes his head, softly swatting James’ hand from his cheek and pressing his fingers beneath his glasses. He slumps a little, back against the shelves. “You said you got a letter from me.”

“The one you wrote.”

“And it said -”

“That you were concerned only for my safety, and couldn’t find the words to express this when I reacted poorly.”

“You did.”

“And you?”

“Didn’t write that,” Q says, letting his hand slip from his face with a weak laugh. “Even if it is true.”

James grins. “See?” He tells him warmly, taking the half-step needed to be close to Q again, stroking his wild hair from his face. “You are a shit.”

“You told me,” Q says, “in your letter, that you’re the shit. And that you’d reacted poorly to bruised pride.”

“Also true,” James says. “Also not written by me.”

“Sheppard?”

“Tanner.”

They draw a breath in tandem, deepened when Bond’s fingers curl in Q’s hair, and Q’s grip tightens on James’ jacket lapels.

“Moneypenny.”

“We owe her a fruit basket for this,” James decides, and before he can say more, lips are against his own, and glasses are smearing against his cheek and Q is melting to softness and warmth beneath him, proud bloody thing that he is. “Or a vibrator.”

“I could arrange to have that made.” 

“I hope you do,” James laughs, nuzzling him before kissing Q a little harder, laughing with him when something on the shelves gets bumped and shifts. “And quick, before she matchmakes someone else.”

Q whimpers high against Bond’s mouth when it closes against his own. Together, their mouths part to allow tongues to slide against the other. Teeth graze tender lips as they pull apart, only to crash against the other’s kiss again. Q grasps James’ cheeks with both hands, knees jellying. He’s slip to the floor outright - from relief, from exhaustion, from the sheer bloody delight of kissing Bond again - if his agent’s arm weren’t locked so securely around his waist.

“I meant it,” he says when they gasp apart. “What I didn’t write. I only wanted you safe. I’d rather you wear it a little large and not get a hole in you than not have it at all.” He’s kissed again but tears his lips away with a moan, and thin arms snared around James’ neck. “I’m sorry,” he sighs.

Bond hums and ducks down to gather Q against him, holding him under his thighs and smiling when Q holds to him tighter. “It was also your way of saying perhaps I can go off diet.”

“Never.”

“Absolutely.”

“Why would I?”

“Because you have a fascination with my stomach when you see it bared, don’t think I haven’t noticed,” his agent laughs, nipping soft against his jaw. “I’m sorry too,” he adds.

Q squirms at the words, as much from relief to hear them as from how very unusual it is to hear Bond apologize for anything, let alone something he’s actually done wrong. He presses his mouth against Bond’s own, to quiet any more apologies. They don’t need them. They’ve shared them, in their own words rather than those of another, however accurate.

“I love your stomach,” Q breathes between kisses. “Soft or hard or -”

“I love that you love it,” answers Bond, his laugh swallowed beneath the snare of Q’s lips. They part with a click and Q shoves Bond’s jacket back off his shoulders. It catches on the button, of course, and pulls tight against his stomach. With a wry smile, Bond loosens it, and lets the garment slip free.

“I love your shoulders,” continues Q, leaving damp spots where his lips meet the fine fabric of James’ shirt. “Your throat, your thighs, your - everything. Every centimeter of it, Christ,” he gasps, as Bond pins him back against the shelves and a bottle of cleaning fluid clatters to the floor. “I’ve missed you.”

“When’s the last time you slept?” Bond whispers, kissing against Q’s jaw and down his throat.

“When was the last time you were over?”

Humming displeasure and possessive snarls both, Bond pulls Q closer and rocks up against him, burying his face against the warm curve where his shoulder meets his neck, relishing the fingers in his hair as Q tangles them there and tugs, his voice quieted to soft puffs of air against the nearest wall.

Beyond the door, Tanner directs his gaze to the handle and back up to where the breath of Q and James both mingle against the thin wall. He brings his tea to his lips but it’s mostly functional rather than necessary - he doesn’t drink it.

“How long have they been in there?” Eve asks, stopping by on her way past, smile evident and chin up in pride.

“Metaphorically or physically?” Tanner asks, beside him, Josie snorts.

“Dr. Hall mentioned something about them coming out of the closet a few weeks ago, I didn’t actually think he was serious.”

“I can never tell when that man is serious,” Tanner admits.

“I assume he’s always serious,” Sheppard says with a shrug, and for an instant over Tanner’s teacup, their eyes meet and quickly part. She tries to mute her smile but can’t, relieved of the burden to do so when there’s a heavy thud against the door and a high, lilting moan caught and quickly muffled.

“Right,” Moneypenny says. “I think we can safely say we’ve satisfied our objectives.”

“Not the only ones being satisfied,” murmurs Tanner, and as Sheppard laughs, Moneypenny ushers them along with a smile.

“Let’s take solace in one conflict put to rest,” she says as they go, and her thoughts turn to how most cleverly to arrange coffee between her two conspirators.

All in a day’s work.


End file.
